For over a decade, a British designer Max Lamb it questions the code and behavior of a contemporary furniture industry still mired in modernist convention and the bottom economic model of often discontinuous mass manufacturing. Defined by the reinterpretation and revitalization of the techniques of know-how, the provocateur has carved, sandcasted, molded and folded an approach of his own: one based on finding new applications for salvaged parts and those unexpected physical elements that no one before him saw fit.
For Lamb—like Augustus Pugin and supporters of the Arts and Crafts movement—aesthetics, and perhaps also function, should always be the result of construction and a reflection of the intrinsic properties of the materials incorporated. This career-defining proposition is fundamentally viable. Little editing or tampering is necessary.
Many of these result in roughly hewn formations—rock sofas where the function of the seat is barely decipherable—but this is not always the case in Lamb’s work. Take the highly developed Economy Chair, now called the Min Chair. In this design, pine beams, all of the same dimension, are carefully cut at the right angle and fitted together in a demanding and daring assembly. The approach is both rudimentary and hyper-mechanical.
It was put into serial production by the innovative Swedish brand Hem—translating a logic of self-construction into a scalable model—the Min Chair is the result of intensive trial and error: research into achieving maximum character with minimal means. No extraneous energy is exerted in the systematic cutting and assembly of the modular components, and thus, in turn, no unnecessary decorative detail is added. The design is unabashedly sculptural yet simple in its ontological self-communication of purpose, deftly turning the modernist doctrine of form following function on its head.
“This is an exciting continuation of our work with Max,” says Petrus Palmér, founder and CEO of Hem. He and his team have been working with Lamb since they started developing their Last Stool product in the early 2010s. Hem works with a tight roster of talent, ones he’s returned to time and time again over the years. “As an editor, our role was to bring that iteration to production without compromising the idea.”
To see this and other works by the designer, visit maxlamb.org.
Photo by Erik Lefvander.
